Since everybody and their pet seems to have gotten in on the 100,000 miles offer from Citibank (still available, by the way), we thought it would be a good idea to point out a great benefit of the card, which is the availability of reduced mileage awards, both one-way and roundtrip, when booking award travel.

The basics

Your Citi Executive MasterCard lets you book main cabin roundtrip awards for 17,500 AAdvantage miles, and one-ways for 8,750 miles. First class awards are available roundtrip for 42,500, or one-ways for 21,250. It is basically 7,500 in savings for roundtrips, and 3,750 for one-ways.

The first thing to note is that not all segments and cities are eligible, and it is a little hard to plan when using this feature, since the availability list is only released 3 months out. That being said, when planning award travel within 3 months, it is worth looking at the list of participating cities to see if those on your plans are available.

Planning

To plan your trip and take advantage of this benefit, you first refer to the list of available cities and then look for MileSAAver award space between your city and your destination. I’m looking to West Palm Beach, Florida as an example, since it is in the list of cities available through May 2014:

I can then go and find any dates that work for me that have low award space:

In this case, I can book an outgoing flight from SAT-PBI from Thursday April 10th to Monday April 14th.

Booking

Unfortunately, you cannot book online, so you will have to call the reservations desk at 1-800-882-8880. There will be a $35 telephone booking fee, but this fee is well worth the 7,500 mile savings.

While some of the major and most popular markets are hard to catch, there are plenty of cities that participate and can save you miles when booking award travel. Flying in and out of a nearby airport can also open up additional options to take advantage of this benefit.

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